Sanctuary

in.”
    “She must be the first new permanent resident here in what, ten years?”
    “Thereabouts.”
    “I can’t imagine why ...” Jo trailed off as it struck her. “It’s not Kirby, is it? Kirby Fitzsimmons? She spent summers here a couple of years running when we were kids.”
    “I guess she liked it well enough to come back.”
    “I’ll be damned. Kirby Fitzsimmons, and a doctor, of all things.” Pleasure bloomed, a surprising sensation she nearly didn’t recognize. “We used to pal around together some. I remember the summer Mr. David came to take photographs of the island and brought his family.”
    It cheered her to think of it, the young friend with the quick northern voice, the adventures they’d shared or imagined together. “You would run off with his boys and wouldn’t give me the time of day,” Jo continued. “When I wasn’t pestering Mr. David to let me take pictures with his camera, I’d go off with Kirby and look for trouble. Christ, that was twenty years ago if it was a day. It was the summer that . . .”
    Brian nodded, then finished the thought. “The summer that Mama left.”
    “It’s all out of focus,” Jo murmured, and the pleasure died out of her voice. “Hot sun, long days, steamy nights so full of sound. All the faces.” She slipped her fingers under her glasses to rub at her eyes. “Getting up at sunrise so I could follow Mr. David around. Bolting down cold ham sandwiches and cooling off in the river. Mama dug out that old camera for me—that ancient box Brownie—and I would run over to the Fitzsimmons cottage and take pictures until Mrs. Fitzsimmons told Kirby and me to scoot. There were hours and hours, so many hours, until the sun went down and Mama called us home for supper.”
    She closed her eyes tight. “So much, so many images, yet I can’t bring any one of them really clear. Then she was gone. One morning I woke up ready to do all the things a long summer day called for, and she was just gone. And there was nothing to do at all.”
    “Summer was over,” Brian said quietly. “For all of us.”
    “Yeah.” Her hands had gone trembly again. Jo reached in her pockets for cigarettes. “Do you ever think about her?”
    “Why would I?”
    “Don’t you ever wonder where she went? What she did?” Jo took a jerky drag. In her mind she saw long-lidded eyes empty of life. “Or why?”
    “It doesn’t have anything to do with me.” Brian rose, took the plate. “Or you. Or any of us anymore. It’s twenty years past that summer, Jo Ellen, and a little late to worry about it now.”
    She opened her mouth, then shut it again when Brian turned and walked back into the house. But she was worried about it, she thought. And she was terrified.
     
     
    LEXY was still steaming as she climbed over the dunes toward the beach. Jo had come back, she was sure, to flaunt her success and her snazzy life. And the fact that she’d arrived at Sanctuary hard on the heels of Lexy’s own failure didn’t strike Lexy as coincidence.
    Jo would flap her wings and crow in triumph, while Lexy would have to settle for eating crow. The thought of it made her blood boil as she raced along the tramped-down sand through the dunes, sending sand flying from her sandals.
    Not this time, she promised herself. This time she would hold her head up, refuse to be cast as inferior in the face of Jo’s latest triumph, latest trip, latest wonder. She wasn’t going to play the hotshot’s baby sister any longer. She’d outgrown that role, Lexy assured herself. And it was high time everyone realized it.
    There was a scattering of people on the wide crescent of beach. They had staked their claims with their blankets and colorful umbrellas. She noted several with the brightly striped box lunches from Sanctuary.
    The scents of sea and lotions and fried chicken assaulted her nostrils. A toddler shoveled sand into a red bucket while his mother read a paperback novel in the shade of a portable awning. A man was slowly turning into a lobster under the merciless sun. Two couples she had served that morning were sharing a picnic and laughing together over the clever voice of Annie Lennox on their portable stereo.
    She didn’t want them—any of them—to be there. On her beach, in her personal crisis. To dismiss them, she turned and walked away from the temporary development, down the curve of beach.
    She saw the figure out in the water, the gleam of tanned, wet shoulders, the glint of sun-bleached